&Stitches Embroidery Swap

I'm a big fan of Carina from Carina's craftblog and &Stitches so when the &Stitches team organized an embroidery swap I had to sign up.  It could be any type of hand embroidery, and the theme was places.  Of course one of my very favorite places is my home mountain, Sierra Blanca, which you may remember from this quilt.  I'm also a big fan of Judith Baker Montano's fabulous free-form embroidery, and since I have her book I thought I'd try out some of her techniques.  I didn't have time for anything nearly as intricate and layered as her work, but I think this was a nice first try!

Since I knew I wouldn't be able to fill in the whole canvas, I started with a picture taken during a summer hike to Sierra Blanca peak.  I think it was my birthday weekend of 2003.  This shot was snapped right before the push up the last little part, after hiking to the top of the ski area.

I printed it out on a transparency and then monoprinted it on interfacing-backed muslin as I described here.  It gives a pleasingly imperfect look, quite different from that which you get printing directly on fabric with the printer (although I do that too).  For this project, where I was going to embroider over some but not all, I wanted the more textured look which comes from the monoprinting.

After monoprinting, before stitching.

Then I just started embroidering away!  It isn't completely filled in but I had lots of fun.  I used regular embroidery floss, perle cotton, and wool, and several different stitches.

To finish, I layered it around matboard (with a single layer of supporting batting to fill it out a bit) and popped it into a frame.  The back has a label telling about it and the picture.

I'm really a novice embroiderer, so I had no idea what would be expected for this swap, but I like the way this turned out and I hope my partner does too!

Sierra Blanca, 2014, Shannon Conley, 9x12

Show Announcement: Beyond Tradition

Hi all, I just wanted to pop in to say that I have several pieces in a SAQA New Mexico regional show called Beyond Tradition.  It's being held at the Hubbard Museum of the American West in Ruidoso Downs, NM and runs from April 5-September 1.  If any of you are traveling through southern New Mexico, you might check it out!

I'm privileged to have three pieces hanging in Beyond Tradition: Winter in Lincoln County 2: Sierra Blanca, Winter in Lincoln County 1: The Orchard, and Ring Around the Mole.

Concurrently hanging at the museum are A Walk in the Wild and A Color Runs Through It, so you can also see Seymour the Coelophysis, Taming the Gorgons, and Black and White and Read All Over.

Many thanks to Betty Busby who has worked really hard to make this happen, and also to everyone else who helped including my super Mom who has been the local contact for it.  

Sierra Blanca: Last quilt of the summer

Some of you may remember my mountain quilt, based on one of my pictures of our home mountain, Sierra Blanca (in southern New Mexico).  I'd started it in the wonderful Gloria Loughman class and had it mostly finished since the spring, but wasn't sure if it needed something else.  I hemmed and hawed, but without much progress.  At one point I thought I should thread paint some trees in the foreground. I tried that but they looked terrible (let me tell you, ripping those out was not fun).  In any case, after several months of looking at it on my design wall, I decided I love it just the way it is.  My eye is instantly drawn to the white mountain peak and it makes me crave home!  I can't wait till Thanksgiving when Mike and I will travel there.

Winter in Lincoln County #2: Sierra Blanca, c. Shannon Conley, 2013, 32 x 21

And here was my original inspiration picture.

Winter is coming (hopefully)!

Sierra Blanca

While away at quilt camp I designed and assembled this quilt top featuring my home mountain Sierra Blanca. Fun fact for all those who imagine that the mountainy parts of New Mexico are all in the north or that southern New Mexico is all desert, or just never really thought much about New Mexico at all, Sierra Blanca Peak is 11,981 feet above sea level and the lovely surrounding towns are between 6,000-8,000 feet.  Makes for beautiful weather with fabulous hiking in the summer, skiing in the winter, and clear blue skies all year round.   Just don't go there right now- this time of year the wind blows 90 miles an hour kicking up super fun dust and allergens (just about like it does here in Oklahoma City).

Anyway, back to the quilt.  Usually I filler my quilts to death but at the urging of the instructor Gloria I decided to keep the quilting simple this time.  She suggested that by varying the thread/quilting weight, the spacing of quilting lines, and the thread color, one could use the quilting to enhance/preserve perspective in the landscape.  I attempted that here, and I think it worked fairly well.  It was really hard to resist going back and filling in, but I did.

On a side note, the quilting quality isn't great (in terms of stitch length, jerkiness etc.).  It had been about a month since I quilted anything and I'm amazed at how quickly my proficiency drops off without regular practice.  I especially noticed it on this quilt since the quilting was looser (and therefore much harder) than what I usually do.  Once again, I note to myself that I should practice on a sandwich every time I start something new.  Sigh.

Anyway,  things to note:  on the mountains, I started off in the foreground with bright green 40 wt thread and stitched the contours several times with far apart lines (I didn't have any 30 wt or 12 wt in the right colors or I probably would have tried it).  As I moved into the background, I used 40 wt thread with only one pass, 50 wt. thread, and then 100 wt thread.  In addition, I tried to make the lines closer together, and the thread colors less vibrant as the hills moved backwards.  In the sky, I tried to match the thread color to the fabric, using several different shades of blue and increasing the spacing as you go up.


As you see it now, I've finished the quilting and squared up the top, but haven't bound/faced it yet.  This is for three reasons.

1.  I can't decide if I should crop it-  I've contemplated cropping a couple inches off of the right side so that the peak isn't so centered, but I kind of like that right side and I haven't made up my mind yet.

2. I can't decide if it needs something else.  I'm not sure what the else would be, but all I know is that I like this but don't love it, and I'm not sure why.

3.  This quilt, the orchard quilt (in progress below) and the llama quilt (not yet started) were originally supposed to be all one piece with the orchard and llama inset into the mountain.  I decided against that, but as I work on the orchard (and look at the pictures of the llama in the snow), they still feel like they fit together in my brain.  All three have the same color scheme- dark greens and browns with blue skies and bright snow, and they feel thematically linked to my home, going from the close-up llama-from-the-backyard, to the orchard spreading out across the property, to the mountain in the near distance.  I can't decide if they should be somehow linked together into one piece (again, not sure how I'd approach that), or just hang as a grouping.  I may not decide on this until I have all three done, but I don't want to cut off any options.

For those of you who've made it to the end of the wordiness, I'd love your input on the three issues above.  I'm linking up with Nina-Marie's art quilt link party since she and her followers always have great suggestions!

Sierra Blanca

I'm having a little difficulty getting back into the blogging swing of things after being gone and being sick.  Since I got back from the course at Empty Spools I haven't done very much sewing.

I would strongly encourage anyone who is interested in designing landscape quilts to take one of Gloria Loughman's classes. It was really great to have five days to work with her- for me the class was the perfect combination of lecture/didactic material, one-on-one consultation with her, and independent work time.  We had a nice large classroom with lots of light and windows, and my mom and I had tables in the back corner so our explosion of fabric and mess didn't get too much in the way of others.

The point of the class was to design and landscape with multiple images embedded in it, but she was very supportive of helping the students make whatever kind of project they were interested in.  I think one of the best parts of the class was how much she helped us get into our quilt whatever it was that was in our minds.  She taught us several of her construction techniques and left it to us whether to incorporate any (or all) of them.  We also painted fabric (for example for use in skies) and talked a lot about color.

My original idea was to take these three pictures of my parent's home in New Mexico and incorporate them into a quilt.  I was going to have our mountain (Sierra Blanca) in the background with the llama as an inset on the left and the apple orchard in the inset on the right.  The llamas live just behind my parent's back fence and it's kind of fun to see them wander up.

I elected to do a watercolor sort of approach with squares of a bunch of different commercial fabrics for my sky, planning to use painted fabrics for the sky in the insets.  After much trial and tribulation (I mean they're just squares, how hard can it be) I got the sky assembled and then started on the mountain.  It's about 20X30", I thought any bigger was too big to start in the class (given the size of our design boards and work spaces and airplane suitcases).  I finished the mountain on the second to last day and was getting ready to start on my insets but Gloria recommended that I leave my mountain as is, and put the insets into something else.  My mountain is fairly detailed and a lot of what makes it look like our mountain would be obscured by insets so I decided to leave my apple orchard and llama for another quilt (and another blog post!).

I'm going to set this top aside until I have a chance to piece my apple orchard top since I have pieces of it floating around the studio that I don't want to lose, but I'm pleased with the direction it's heading.  Hope you guys are doing some fun sewing!